Women writers: dull, depressed and domestic

Oldfield: 'The letters give us a fresh perspective on what was thought about Woolf'

Their novels are part of the literary canon, their struggle to be recognised well chronicled, but the efforts of George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf have done little to change negative views of women writers.

In the introduction to 13, a collection of poetry, short stories and extracts from novels, published by Picador, the authors Toby Litt and Ali Smith make a sweeping condemnation of the subject matter, writing style and preoccupations of female writers. Litt, the author of several books including Corpsing and deadkidsongs, and Smith, the Scottish writer who has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize, sifted through numerous submissions from women writers. Few impressed them.

In the introduction to the collection the authors write: "On the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking - as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell."

Their criticisms drew angry responses from leading authors yesterday, some accusing them of consigning the works of Chekhov, Tolstoy and Woolf to the critical dustbin by suggesting the domestic was never exciting, powerful or worthy as a subject matter.

"Defining domestic as dull is a complete misnomer," said the author Kirsty Gunn. "This is where a large proportion of our [women's] lives are spent; there is no reason why the word should be loaded with such pejorative meaning. I am a writer but at the moment I am frying fish fingers and listening to a child's violin lesson."

Amanda Craig, the author, accused the editors of not spreading their net wide enough for submissions. "I never knew this was happening; they didn't come to me. I wonder how many people they did approach."

She agreed, however, that there was some truth in their comments. "Women do focus on the domestic because that reflects the truth of their lives."